Computer systems have long been used to manage business related information. However, costs associated with storage, communication and information processing prohibited the use of computers to store and to manage other kinds of data. When costs came down, it became feasible to digitize and store other forms of data, including digitized data. Digitized data primarily consists of digitized visual images, audio and video, although is not limited to those types of data. Advanced information management system structures are implemented to store and manage digitized data.
In very large-scale computer systems having many independent processing nodes, problems exist in which fast access is unable to be provided to files in the system from a particular processing node.